Brad Flory column: Hurray for Hollywood and its new coney joint

The humble but delicious Coney Island hot dog is poised to conquer Western civilization.

Step one: A moviemaker with roots in suburban Detroit plans to open a 24-hour coney joint in, of all places, Los Angeles.

Hollywood types will plop down on stools and order two with the works after the trendy clubs close at dawn. Christian Bale and Halle Berry will notice the enchanting coney aroma lingering on their fingertips for hours. Not to mention coney burps.

Step two: When the Hollywood elite is hooked, coneymania will quickly spread to New York, Paris and London.

This can only be good for Jackson, the center of the coney-eating world.

Lifelong Michigan residents, raised with the nutritional advantage of exposure to places like Jackson Coney Island, are often surprised to learn the world is ignorant.

Most Americans either never heard of a coney, or they confuse them with the chili dog, which is canned chili served over hot dogs instead of as God intended, in a bowl with crackers.

A coney most definitely is no chili dog.

“Nobody sells hot dogs like that on Coney Island,” a transplant from New York to Jackson once objected. “The name is a lie!”

Yet Detroit is a bigger city, and its version of coney dog is familiar to more eaters.

Detroit and other cities have soupy sauce that tastes OK but is messy to eat. A Jackson coney has looser, drier, meatier topping than found anywhere else.

People reared near Detroit always express shocked disapproval on first exposure to a Jackson coney.

I myself, raised in the pleasures of Angelo’s Coney Island in Flint and Pixie in Mount Pleasant, once found the Jackson coney weird. Yes, I was a fool.

Let Detroit lead the worldwide triumph of the coney. Once the jet-set is addicted, it will undoubtedly seek out the superior form that sprang from the love and sweat of Macedonian immigrants to Jackson.

Imagine the movie stars who will flock to Jackson for the International Coney Centennial Gala in just three short years.